Last week’s experimental post went really well, so this week we’re back with another Weekly PUBG Corp. Community Update.

In case you missed the first one, here’s a quick explanation: This is an end-of-the-week summary of both announcements we’ve made along with responses to feedback from players. It's NOT intended to be a comprehensive final answer for every single question or complaint posted in our communities—often, we simply don’t have updates we can share (either because a hard decision hasn’t yet been made or because we haven’t finished thinking about how to solve an issue ourselves). Still, we’re trying to peel back the curtain here and have a more intimate conversation than you’d normally get otherwise. We hope you like it!

For a little more context on why we’re doing these posts and our goals for them, check out this post.

Because the launch of Sanhok is taking up so much of our focus, this week’s post will necessarily be shorter than last week’s. We hope you still find it useful!

Our new map, Sanhok, is finally available on live servers! (Drop Temple unless you’re scared.)

At the same time, we’ve just released our first ever Event Pass, a special bundle of missions and rewards that runs for the four weeks after Sanhok’s release. Event Pass: Sanhok is available now for purchase on Steam and in the in-game store.

To learn more about the Event Pass, check out this super fresh animated microsite. Also check out this post to learn about two additional items everyone can earn for free (not shown on the microsite).

We’ve been paying close attention to all the feedback you’ve shared about our first ever Event Pass, which we’re running to celebrate the launch of Sanhok on live servers.

Many of you seem pretty excited about the 17 permanent, exclusive cosmetic items included with the Event Pass (including the full Jailbird set, Escapee set, Prison Guard uniforms, and Beach set).

But we’ve also heard from many of you that you’d like the chance to earn more permanent items, even if you aren’t paying for the Event Pass. We want the event to feel fun and meaningful for all our players, so we’re introducing two new items that you can permanently unlock for free. You’ll be able to unlock these by completing the Event Pass missions regardless of whether you pay for the pass.

We hope you like these new rewards! Remember that all players who reach certain levels will earn a free nickname change and a permanent, exclusive parachute skin as well.

Our new map, Sanhok, is coming to live servers in under 24 hours. Starting soon, the servers will go down for an extended period of maintenance and you’ll be able to start downloading the supersized Sanhok patch. Please note that the map won’t be playable until maintenance concludes.

As you know, ever since we launched the first version of map selection in Update #12, certain queues in OC have suffered from serious matchmaking problems.

First-person queues—FPP Solos in particular—have suffered from extremely long or even infinite matchmaking times. Players have reported issues finding games in FPP Duos and FPP Squads as well. Some players have reported that they’re sometimes able to get these queues working by cancelling and restarting the matchmaking process, but even this workaround solution is unreliable. Over time, this has created a cyclical effect in which players simply give up trying to queue up for FPP games.

This post is an experiment: It's an end-of-the-week summary of the highest-level feedback we've gotten from all of you in the PUBG community along with responses addressing that feedback. It's NOT intended to be a comprehensive final answer for every single question or complaint posted in our communities—that wouldn't be possible. For many issues, the answer simply has to be "we’ve got no updates to share." However, we are going to be giving a lot of updates on issues the community is concerned about and sharing whatever we can.

This is just an experiment for now, but if it goes well, we'll strongly consider doing it every Friday. Let's jump in.

Note: This post will mostly focus on PC, but we’ll also consider doing a more Xbox-focused post depending on the reception of this one.

Update #14 brought some big upgrades to throwables, introduced the M24 rifle to the world’s weapon spawn pool, and (most importantly) implemented a few clutch performance improvements. There are still many more performance improvements in the works—expect to see more make their way over to live servers in update #15.

Today, though, we want to take a quick look back at the four testing rounds we ran for Sanhok, our 4km x 4km map which is coming to live servers on June 22.

From all of us at PUBG Corporation, thanks so much to all of you who participated in the four rounds of testing we conducted on Sanhok.

We’re full-steam ahead with preparations for the launch of our new map (Sanhok’s coming June 22), so this week we’re bringing back War Mode: One Shot, One Kill. We’ll keep making tweaks to War Mode in future releases, but for now, this version is exactly the same as last time.

The most recent round of Sanhok testing has turned up some interesting performance problems which we’re still working on solving.

We’ve identified an issue where unnecessary packets are transferred from the client to the server, which causes excess load and dips in server performance.

Currently, the distance in which players are rendered is up to a maximum radius of 1km from your current position. As Sanhok is 1/4th the size of Erangel and Miramar, the number of players within this 1km area is generally much higher.

Some performance issues have arisen due to this, with the direct result being a reduced server frame speed, which leads to early-game server performance issues, including player teleporting or stuttering. According to our internal data, the kill rate at extremely long distances is very low and therefore we’ve decided to reduce the maximum player render distance specifically on Sanhok, which will increase performance.

Many of you may be wondering why the Aviator Crate, which was released on May 16, is still unmarketable on Steam. Our current plan is to lift market restrictions on the Aviator Crate on June 13, 8pm PDT / June 14, 5am CEST / June 14, 12pm KST.

Previous crates (like the Equinox Crate) were unmarketable for a shorter amount of time, but we’ve seen this cause somewhat abusive behavior of the market system—especially in the form of jacked-up prices for rare items. We believe that implementing slightly longer market restriction times will help alleviate this issue.

Thanks for understanding! We’ll keep you updated as we continue to make improvements to our market rules and systems.

We’ve added a new anti-cheat solution, developed in-house at PUBG Corp. Before we implement this tech on live servers, we’d first like to see how it works out on the test server. For this, we’ll need your help!

If you experience any issues with lowered FPS / FPS drops while using the new anti-cheat tech on our test servers, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this post to forward your specific PC information to our development team.

As discussed in last week’s dev letter, we’ve been hard at work improving all the fine details of our newest map, Sanhok. This week, Sanhok is coming back once again for a fourth round of testing on the Experimental Server.

As before, everyone who owns a copy of PUBG will be able to play simply by downloading the updated version of the “PUBG: Experimental Server” found in your Steam library.

Ever since we launched the 1.0 version of PUBG earlier this year, we’ve been focused on building our team so we can invest in the game’s ongoing development. We’ve been building new content (like Sanhok), quality-of-life improvements (like map selection and weapon balance), and a whole series of aggressive anti-cheat measures. We want PUBG to be the best game possible so players like you keep loving—and playing—it.

Although we’ve made some meaningful improvements to PUBG, we’ve fallen short in other ways. Players have rightfully called us out for failing to address complaints about performance, and recently we haven’t done the best job of communicating about the changes we’re making to the game. Today we want to change that by talking in-depth about the things we’re prioritizing. We’ll also tease some of upcoming content we plan to add to the game.

This Dev Letter is the first of many more to come. Without further ado, let’s get into it.

By now you’ve probably heard about the PUBG Global Invitational 2018 (PGI 2018), a global esports tournament that will pit 20 teams against each other in a contest for $2 million—and the ultimate PUBG bragging rights. You may have also heard the dirty details about the PGI North America Qualifier.

Today it’s time to talk about yet another regional qualifier: Oceania.

Beginning June 2nd, 80 teams from OCE will compete for 30,000 AUD and a chance to represent the region at PGI 2018.

Full schedule and details below. To register your team for the PGI Oceania Qualifier, sign up using this link[play.eslgaming.com].

This week’s event is for only the sneakiest of snakes. It’s a crossbows and melee weapons only, 100-man blowout on Erangel. While you’re looting for quivers and bolts, be sure to keep an eye out for ghillie suits—they’ll spawn randomly alongside the usual world loot.

Best of luck, and remember if archery isn’t your strong suit you can always just pan people to death.

Some of you have noticed that we made some changes to the way sound works in PUBG’s most recent patch. First things first: We should have explained the change in the patch notes. We messed up here, and we hope you’ll accept our apology.

Many of you have called us out about not being thorough enough about documenting changes in the patch notes, and rightfully so. It’s something we’re going to try our best to fix going forward, and you guys should absolutely continue to hold us accountable when we miss something. We can and will do better.

With that said, we’d like to explain what’s changed with the game’s sound systems. We’ll also share how we plan to further improve the systems moving forward.

First, the primary audio changes have to do with the sounds other players’ gunshots make. The difference is due to some newly implemented functions of the HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) plugin.